Janus and the Prodigal
by Erinya
Summary: A few years after the events of AWE, Jack returns to Shipwreck Cove. Teague POV, gen, some implied JE. Written for Virgo79 in the BPS Secret Santa exchange.


**Disclaimer**: Property of Johnny Depp and Keith Richards (and Disney, nominally.)  
**Note**: Written for **virgo79**, with much love, for this year's Black Pearl Sails Secret Santa--on time, no less--and brought to you by the AWE soundtrack. Janus, of course, is the god of changes, of beginnings and endings, who looks forward and back as the year turns.

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**Janus and the Prodigal**

The Hall of the Brethren lies drowsing and empty this afternoon, at least of people; it's full instead of shadows and long shafts of sunlight slanting down from the small, high, angled windows that were gunports in another life, catching on broken shards of glass until they wink and glimmer like jewels half-buried in the layer of sand left on the boards of the floor from a parade of pirates' boots, picking out columns of dust hanging in the warm air. Outside and above—for the Hall is the hull of a great galleon set like a bowl in Shipwreck's center, its middecks torn out to leave the curving bones of the outer shell rising high to the weather-tight upper deck—the genial noise of untaxed commerce and the shouts of children at play mingle with the cries of the gulls that are the city's ever-present pests, mascots, and flying garbage disposals.

Teague sits in his customary place, somewhat apart from the long Lords' table; lets his mind, mellowed to wandering by rum and hashish-laced tobacco, follow his guitar's flow of melody into times past. It's midwinter in the North, but here—a few dozen leagues off the Equator—there's little thought of cold or snow, and the Cove, sheltered from wind and waves by the hollow caldera that once held a mountain's heart, has weathered the hurricane season with minimal damage. The tropical warmth is a kindness to old bones, although the damp sometimes seeps up from below and works its way into Teague's joints, reminding him that long years have left him still hale but increasingly a relic of another age, whose contemporaries, great loves and sworn enemies alike, have passed away before him.

Deeply absorbed by a complicated harmony, modulating from a major to a minor key, his thoughts slip sideways in that current to a black-haired, black-eyed beauty: long brown limbs, clever bird-like mind always in flight of fancy, and a smile to break and yoke a man's heart forever. It takes him an indeterminate time to register the figure lounging in the doorway at the other end of the hall, and a moment more to identify its dark eyes and sardonic half-smile as those of Isabella's son.

Jack flicks a hand in a half-salute without lifting his arm, little more than a token acknowledgment of Teague's notice. After a moment he saunters forward, picking up an abandoned amphora from the table and examining it, discarding it when it proves itself dry. Teague eyes him, waiting, his hands picking out slow arpeggios to accompany the leisurely dance of dust motes in the high dome of the Hall. He knows better than to press Jack into speech or sentiment from a thoughtful mood; best way to get a lot of nonsense from that quick, subtle tongue. So it was even when the boy was young, walking a fine line between gawkiness and too much grace for a man-child, a wild shock of black hair over eyes that saw more than they revealed. For an instant Teague sharply regrets sending that boy away from Shipwreck, only to have him return so many decades later as this wary, half-mad, dangerous man: in every way, ostentatiously, what Teague had hoped he would not become, as if Jack had set out to embody an ironic commentary on the legend to which his father belonged.

"What," inquires Jack at last, "no fatted calf for the prodigal, then?"

Teague considers him: posed like a challenge, but disguising some kind of restless uncertainty; Teague thinks he can put a name to it. Jack has sought, but has not found. "She's not here, boy."

Jack's gaze wings away across the hall, his body settling into lines of practiced nonchalance. "Who?"

"Not one to sit and wait, that one, nor one to be bound. Like your mother."

Jack flicks a glance to Teague's belt. "Only one way to keep a woman like that, eh?"

Teague ignores this. "So what have you been off and seeking, Jackie-boy?"

"The usual nonsense." Jack's fingers trace castles in the air. "Phantasies and legends."

"Did ye find what ye sought?" Only ask questions to which the answers are already known.

"Not as such, no," Jack says, with some caution.

"Ah," says Teague. "It's as I told you. 'S not living forever that's the trick, now is it?"

Jack shakes his head, braids swinging with a flash of baubles. "I've lived with myself these forty-odd years, old man. Didn't come here for your quaint aphorisms, either." And he sounds younger than those years, suddenly, the same boy who stood in this same hall three decades past, all flash and defiance, demanding to know why he couldn't go to sea with the rest of the Shipwreck boys.

Bending his head over the strings of his guitar, Teague doesn't answer; he strums the old song, the old call that he wrote so many years before, now sung by every pirate on the seven seas. So much for aphorisms. _The seas be ours, and fight the powers; where e'er we will, we'll roam._ He's been meaning to write another verse, for the new King. A new legend, less dark, but as yet unfinished.

Jack fidgets; Teague can feel it more than see it. The boy never could stay still, neither in mind nor tongue nor body. Could never wait for the opportune moment, though he always had a good eye for the patterns that could have told him when that moment might present itself. Teague wonders if the man has learned to bide his time, learned strategy to serve his quicksilver intelligence. He doesn't know. There is a great deal, in fact, that he doesn't know about his son.

He looks up, quickly, to find Jack disappearing out the door.

"You'll find, I think," he calls, "your King'll be back before the New Year."

Jack stands poised in the doorway, turned half-about, his head cocked like a bird's, on the edge of flight.

"If," says Teague, "ye decide to stay so long, that is."

Jack says nothing for a moment; then, "Would she…do you think she'd be pleased, then?"

Teague shrugs. "I can't promise a fatted calf. But she often speaks of you." He pauses, adds slyly, "And there's a son. Three years old. A fine boy."

"Is there? That's interesting." Jack betrays nothing. "Pity about the father, eh?"

"Aye," says Teague. "A pity indeed."

"The new year," says Jack, thoughtfully. "It's not so long as all that, I suppose."

A little less than two weeks. "No," Teague says. "Not so long at all."


End file.
